A near-death experience on the New York subway compels Salvage's wry heroine to retreat to her native Virginia and reminisce. Living by herself in a ramshackle house with an overgrown garden, she parades nightly for an invisible audience to the tune of smoky jazz, clad in thrift-store ballgowns. This reverie is disturbed by unannounced visits from her gently rebuking mother Lois, who lives alone in the family home nearby. In that home is a closet, in which resided Nancy, a never-born wraith of a sister with whom the narrator secretly communed throughout her adolescence. Lois isn't short on kookiness either - gaily, girlishly, she begins to introduce her bemused daughter to an entire troupe of living saints, from John to Thomas to Bartholomew. Long-buried exasperation and rivalry ferment in a disarmingly hazy, intriguing novel, and although the prose is overly rich, it's balanced by Kotapish's keenly mordant tone.

The First Verse, by Barry McCrea (Brandon, £9.99)

Nineteen-year-old Niall, having spent the summer moping over an unrequited crush on schoolfriend Ian, is hesitant about leaving his suburban home for university life in Dublin. Self-involved, precocious, cautious about coming out, he is soon swept along by a boisterous crowd. Yet Niall's underlying doubts find focus through a chance meeting with older students John and Sarah, feverish acolytes of a cult which dictates that actions be determined by slavishly following random lines from books. The pair eventually allow Niall to join their incantatory sessions; soon he is renouncing friends and family for the dangerously transcendent experiences on offer. John and Sarah appear as faintly ridiculous, their intense practices nonsensical, and the authorial voice can be pedagogical. Yet Niall's crises are powerfully drawn, and the Dublin he inhabits is warm, vibrant and entirely contemporary.

Show Me the Sky, by Nicholas Hogg (Canongate, £12.99)

Policeman Jim Dent is fleeing his own domestic demons by investigating the disappearance of young rock megastar Billy K. Aside from numerous unsubstantiated glimpses across the globe, Billy hasn't been heard of since vanishing from his Cornish clifftop mansion a year ago. First stop for Dent is Sydney, but the trail also leads to the Australian desert, Kenya and Fiji, through the final odyssey of music journalist Connor Scott, lost in the outback with a manuscript, part of the 1834 travel diary of Nelson Babbage. A Fijian protégé of the London Mission School, Babbage was returning to his homeland with fellow preachers on a doomed voyage. The connection to Billy K? The last page of the diary was with him when he went missing. Hogg's scope is ambitious, but the glut of characters and locations could have done with some trimming.

The Story of Forgetting, by Stefan Merrill Block (Faber, £14.99)

According to the Alzheimer's Association, by 2050 16 million people in the US alone will develop some form of the disease. It's not surprising, therefore, that the issues surrounding it are currently being explored in fiction. Block's compassionate, wildly inventive novel deals with a family traumatised through early-onset Alzheimer's. Teenager Seth's mother Jamie is barely 40 when increasingly erratic behaviour leads to her being diagnosed with the disease. Horrified by his father's dazed inertia, Seth commits himself to investigating Jamie's history, until now shrouded in secrecy. On the other side of Texas, a 68-year-old recluse, hunchbacked Abel Haggard, reflects on the lifelong triangle between himself, brother Paul and Paul's wife Mae. Block has taken a bleak subject and fashioned a story of profound solace and charm.